Benefits of Being Ginger
by c1araoswa1d
Summary: The Doctor's always wanted to be ginger, happily there's a product for that.


"I look like an idiot."

The Doctor frowns, eyebrows dropping into an all-too-familiar wave of condemnation bordering the tensed skin of his forehead and Clara almost laughs, but she knows if she does, his head will be in the sink and this experiment will be over. It's a miracle he'd permitted her to have her way in the first place, but she supposed deep down, past the cynicism for the process, his curiosity at the outcome offered her a reprieve from his general disapproval of her whims.

"You won't know if you look like an idiot for at least ten minutes," she allows, stripping her hands of the gloves to move around him, settled on her toilet, to take a seat against the edge of her tub. She drops the stained objects into the bin and the Doctor gestures at them with a point of a crooked slender finger.

She waits with a smile as he nods and explains, "I can surmise I look like an idiot from the shade of artificial coloring on those gloves." His hand comes up to wave near his mess of hair, plastered neatly to his head in a brown paste and he winces, "I don't mind my hair. It's silver, just like the leaves on the trees back on Gallifrey. I used to collect them as a child, kept them 'til they withered. It's nostalgic," he tells her expressly, bowing his chin slightly to give her a look very much like a punished student might to gain her sympathy.

Sighing, Clara reminds, "And every time you see a ginger bloke walk past on the street, you stare. Sometimes you grumble," and to the narrowing of his eyes, she points, "You physically grumble because you've wanted to be ginger so badly for so long."

With a shrug, he offers, "And I thought I'd leave it to chance. Eventually I'd regenerate into a ginger."

"Thirteen times, and not one ginger."

His arms cross and he frowns, "No telling what the War Doctor might have been in his youth, had he the chance to have one." He pokes a finger out from underneath his elbow, "Could have been ginger."

Clara stares at him a moment, the look of indignation painting his face made ridiculous by the goo on his head, going darker as they sat in waiting. She smiles and relaxes, the front bottom bit of her old shirt, dripped with the stains of hair dyes past sit crumpled within her hands as she watches him look away and wonders just what he might look like with those waves drenched in wine colored hues.

The box he'd picked for himself had been the color of a Tawny Port, the lightest shade she would allow. He'd originally grabbed a bright orange with an oversized smile before she'd handed him a bag of carrots and hissed, " _This, this is what you'd look like_."

"How often do you do this sort of thing?" He questions calmly, fingers picking at his plaid green trousers.

It's the first time it's registered how casual the moment truly was. Him on her toilet in a white t-shirt, pale arms hanging comfortably against his thin frame, slouched there without the general tension of an adventure; her at the edge of her tub, toes curling into the rug at the end of bare legs scarcely covered by a set of boxers the color of rosé champagne. She releases her shirt to pick at her fingers, wishing she had a glass of wine in her hand to occupy it then, possibly to muddle the sudden anxiety that chilled her body, yet warmed her cheeks.

Shrugging, she tells him, "Dunno, every few months to cover new growth."

"Growth of what?" He shoots with an identical shrug.

Hands coming up, she laughs, "My hair."

"Why?" The Doctor scoffs, "Is the natural color so hideous?"

"No," and with a shake of her head, she offers, "It's pretty much the same color."

One eyebrow lifts, wrinkling his brow and she can see the gears turning now just as her stomach does because she knows she's opened herself up to the question he's going to ask, and she knows she's going to have to deal with the answer's repercussions. The Doctor takes a breath, leaning back as he straightens, and quickly questions, "What growth are you covering, Clara?"

"The grey," she murmurs.

His hand comes up to his ear, almost touching the coloring in his hair. "The what?"

Looking away, she states slowly, sadly, "The grey."

He's silent, but she can feel his eyes on her, and she can almost hear the thoughts spinning around in his mind as she looks to him. There's a curiosity there, one that she'd gotten used to seeing, but hadn't seen in quite some time aimed at her. There's an amusement just behind it, one that maybe understands without her telling him, but she knows he's going to make her follow through anyways.

Nodding, the Doctor prods, "Why would you want to cover the grey?"

Clara slumps and her hands clasp together again, twisting nervously. "For you, you regenerated into grey and for all we know you could regenerate into diapers next," and to his scowl, she continues, "As a baby." Taking a breath, she tells him, "Humans have to grow in a linear way, and we try not to be, but we're generally aware of our time passing away, it gets ticked down by the increasing number of greys."

Her eyes shift to the wall and her heart thumps just once a bit harder than normal, enough for her to feel that blood surge through the organ. One day there'll be just one thump left, she thinks to herself as she hears him shifting towards her. His hands slide easily around hers, holding them gently, but firmly, their warmth soothing away the cold that had seeped into her own. The Doctor takes several long breaths with her, synchronous in a way that closes her eyes, unfurls her brow, and drops her shoulders.

She wonders whether he's connected to her then, psychically, or whether this were a moment of true camaraderie– the sort her mother used to tell her about. _When you were in love_. When there was that one person in the whole world who could still all your fears by their mere presence. Clara opens her eyes to look to him, a silent apology on her lips – not for what she'd said, but for reminding him of how fleeting she was. She watches him glance around them before his eyes land on their hands, held tightly together.

Desperately, she might say if she dared.

It was a small moment, she knew, but a crucial one all the same. It was a second in time when the Doctor slowed to a stop to recognize that one day this would all be gone. One day there would be no more silly conversations; one day there would be no more whims of _her particular_ impulses; one day there would be no more Clara Oswald holding his hands in the toilet with hair dye on their heads, contemplating the frailty of a human life. And she knew that's why he'd let her.

There would be no regrets, she knew, or at least as few as possible.

"Let's not dwell on the greys today, eh, Clara?" he breathes, a hint of sadness tainting his ordinarily confident voice. "We've gone and covered them up, painted over them like patching a torn shirt."

"Not quite," she replies lightly, laughter doing little to mask her pain.

His hands give hers a squeeze and then they release, grasping themselves against his knees as though they were at a loss for what to do without hers within them. Clara wonders whether her absence could feel so profound despite their proximity to one another in that cramped little space. She thinks to the times he's greeted her exuberantly, as though it'd been a span of time far greater than the hours it had been in reality. Her mind drifts to his face when she was old in a dream, and the way he had looked upon her when he thought he'd missed her life.

They were such little things in the grand scheme of things, she used to think of humans. Billions upon billions of humans would litter the Earth as compost and ash; one day she would too and she would question what impact she'd had, just before she left. She looked to his eyes, staring away in contemplation of that life she would live – whether with him or without, and she knew she'd left a crater of an impact on each of his hearts.

Not so little a thing as she might have thought in her youth.

Their gazes meet and for a moment they simply smirk at one another, that tiny spark Clara hopes is exclusive to each other twinkling in their eyes as they silently acknowledge one other. Clara wonders whether his greys are a sign that perhaps he's drawing to a close himself; he's greyer now than he'd been when he'd been born into this incarnation and there really was no telling how many regenerations he'd have after this one. Or whether he'd have any at all. He gives a small nod and reaches to give her wrist a gentle caress of his thumb before breaking that connection between them.

Perhaps _too_ intimate, she pondered, for him to allow it any longer.

The Doctor stands to look at himself in her bathroom mirror, head tilting as he grins in amusement over his appearance before frowning to ask, "Should a ginger be this brown," and then he looks to her, continuing, "Should a brown be that ginger?"

Clara begins laughing before jumping up to nudge him aside and look to her own head, a color like the merlot in her kitchen, and she shrieks, "No!"

"What happened?" The Doctor shouts in response, body tensing, hands spread into the space in front of him, as though ready to fight some sort of monster.

"The bottles, I put them here," she lands a hand to the faux marble of the vanity, "I mixed them and put them here, brown on the right, ginger on the left, and then I went to get..."

"Oh," the Doctor utters.

Clara stops to look up at him slowly as he shifts, straightening as he bows his head, three chins easily folding against his neck like a frightened turtle. He points and utters, hands gesturing about, "You told me to sit and I stood and I bumped and they fell and I hadn't realized there was a method..."

"You," she begins, jumping around him to turn the knobs on her tub, "You," she repeats, wanting to scream at him, except he's staring back at her with large eyes, hands clasped against each other at his chest... in his white t-shirt with his pale arms. Almost, she thought, _innocent_. With a gloppy hair-dye covered head. "Go rinse your head off in the sink!"

He stands deadly still and then shoots off, stomping down her hallway before she hears the water rush on just before she bends to begin washing her own head of the offending substance that's been soaking her brown locks for at least fifteen minutes. She whines softly, seeing it circle the drain, most definitely _red_ , until it's clear, hearing his breathing just outside of the bathroom.

"It's not so bad," the Doctor states in a sort of panic as she stands and grabs for her towel. Drying her hair slightly, she watches him there, not concerned with his own head of sopping wet darkened hair. He simply looks to her for his cue, worried she was angry, so she gives him a half smile to alleviate that worry, and then she takes a step forward, ready to turn and face her reflection in the mirror there with a grimace.

It was red.

Not a comical red, she decides, but it's still a shade of pinot noir that makes her uncomfortable to look at in the mirror. And then she feels the Doctor's hands atop her shoulders, massaging gently as he says quietly, "I'm sorry, truly, I am." Then he adds, "It washes out, right? You said 30 washes? I could take you to a planet with waterfalls and wading pools that are lit at night by the bioluminescent moss that covers the rock bed at the bottom."

"We'd have to spend days there," she laments, head tilting as she studies her reflection before looking to the Doctor's, seeing his eyes drifting over her damp hair.

Clara examines the small smile on his lips, just before he hides it, and for a moment she contemplates the notion that he'd switched the bottles on purpose. To what end, she doesn't know, but he's calm, fingers pressing into the muscles of her shoulders before sifting up through her locks delicately, testing the color against his fingers.

He sighs, uttering almost in a whisper, "Then we'll spend days."

Swallowing roughly as his hands drop away, she waits for him to lift his eyes from her mane to meet her gaze through their images in the mirror, giving him a subtle nod as he smiles. There's something magical in those eyes as they stare into her through that reflection, something pleased and excited. Something that sends a tingle up along her spine just before he looks to his brown hair, falling chaotically around his head.

And he tells her quietly, "I look like an idiot."


End file.
